Film Review: ‘The Boss Baby’ is your typical kids film while still being something more

It has been a long time since a kid’s movie has been just for kids. While they have always been targeted for the younger audience, these films have always found ways to sprinkle in enough humour and story to keep the older audience entertained. This was the main hurdle The Boss Baby faced. They needed to make a film that was about kids, from the point of view from a kid, for kids, but make sure it still appealed to adults.

Well I am glad to say, I think they did it. There were two main driving forces that made this film entertaining. The first was the overall writing. Whether it was the dialogue or overall story, it was extremely well written and played out great on screen. I found the story to be simple enough that a person of any age could understand it, but still be layered enough that as kids go back to this film in the future, they are going to take more away from it every time. The dialogue did what all good dialogue in a kids movie should do. It managed to achieve that perfect balance of being not too complex for the younger audience, but still put some great adult humour nuggets. I think having someone like Alec Baldwin gave the writers a great opportunity to push some of that adult humour, and they took that opportunity with both hands and ran with it.

The second thing that really stood out in this film was Alec Baldwin himself. While a lot of the character does come down to the writing, Baldwin was able to tap into shades of his Jack Donaghy performance in 30 Rock and give a great business man voice performance. The tone in his voice really complimented the sarcastic tone in which his dialogue was written in and because of that, some of the dialog that wasn’t as well written came off really great in the moment. Plus, you just know he was in a suit every minute he was recording this.